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By JmsCrk on
Librivox.org houses an active community of volunteers that read and record books that are out of copyright and releases the audio recordings into the public domain, for free.
The quality of the recordings is generally high, but with thousands of books completed it can be hard to tell where to start if you are a listener who wants to find the best books and the best recordings. The librivox.org website is aimed primarily at the volunteers and doesn't allow any way to rate or rank the recordings.
Audio Zero allows easy searching of the audio files and also lets you bookmark, rate and comment on them in a minimal, beautiful interface. Web 2.0 goodness!
Librivox API integration
Librivox supplies a search API that returns results in an xml format, and by writing a fairly simple parser and using the form api I was able to import the books to a content type created with CCK. A cron job regularly imports the most recent new releases.
Playback and download
The audio files themselves remain on archive.org so our bandwidth is reasonable, and as well as offering a .zip download for each book we use jplayer to enable playing in-browser.
Amazon API integration
The only advertising on the site currently comes from showing Amazon products that match the book on display. These API searches are cached locally after being requested with javascript after the page load, to keep things as quick as possible.
Interactive feature modules
The biggest advantage to using Drupal for this project is that once the books are imported we can use any of the array of interactive features provided by stable Drupal modules.
We are currently using Fivestar http://drupal.org/project/fivestar and Flag http://drupal.org/project/flag with other extensions quite possible if usage picks up in the future.
Other useful modules
- http://drupal.org/project/similar - Similar entries helps us in this case find similar books
- http://drupal.org/project/top_searches - Records the top searches
- Views, CCK, imagecache, admin and other usual suspects
Feedback
Please check out www.audiozero.com - I'd appreciate your feedback and suggestions.
Comments
Cool site, JmsCrk. Did you
Cool site, JmsCrk.
Did you start from a ready-made theme or created the theming for the site from ground up?
How did you do the blue background with the moving pieces in the front page?
Thanks Neil, it's a totally
Thanks Neil, it's a totally custom theme design, the movement on the home page is a nifty little piece of javascript that moves a couple of transparent PNGs - quite a simple effect, fast to load, and it gives just a tiny bit of interest when first viewing the page. When we created that effect we sat here for about 10 mins just refreshing the page to stare :P
James
| websites | drupal | marketing || chocchip.com.au |
Fantastic site. I notice that
Fantastic site.
I notice that some of the descriptions on new page are not having their html tags stripped propery
http://www.audiozero.com/new
Would be great to have more obvious functionality to browse by category etc. (obviously you can click on the category on already existing books, but people might want more browsing features)
Yes, browse by category would
Yes, browse by category would be great - and not hard to implement as they're all handled by taxonomy. The reason I haven't done it yet is to avoid confusing or intimidating people as the list is quite long. But it would be handy so maybe it's time.
Not sure what's going on with the tags in the descriptions - sometimes they are included in the feed and sometimes not...
| websites | drupal | marketing || chocchip.com.au |
Fiddling with the input
Fiddling with the input format in Views should be able to fix it maybe?
Looks like you're using the Node Row Style. I know that if you are using Fields Row Style you can opt to strip html tags out of specific fields (by clicking 'Trim this field to a maximum length', then clicking 'Strip HTML tags').
Thanks for the hint
Actually it's using a tpl file for the teasers and the description is the main node body field, but I've had a play around with the input filters and set it to strip disallowed tags and I think that's fixed it.
| websites | drupal | marketing || chocchip.com.au |
Lovely site
I really love your site. It's very simple and easy to use. There are a couple of questions I would like to ask you if you don't mind:
How did you create the columns on the front page?
For each product when the intro link is clicked on it reveals a more detail in a toggle format. Please how did you do this.
Very brilliant site. I love it!
Thanks bolaowoade!
The columns on the front page are done fairly simply with a page-front.tpl that has three new regions for the columns. I use views to create blocks with the content for each column and put each block into the correct region. The rest is CSS. Is that what you mean?
The 'more details' toggle: do you mean for the info field that lists the readers? That's just a little javascript.
| websites | drupal | marketing || chocchip.com.au |
Very nice!
Very nice design, and concept. Excellent work! :)
Completely minor nit, but i noticed that the filter "tips" page isnt loading content (at least not for an anonymous user):
http://www.audiozero.com/filter/tips
Best of luck to you with the site!
Better Formats
Fixed that with a simple tweak, thanks Better Formats! http://drupal.org/project/better_formats
| websites | drupal | marketing || chocchip.com.au |
Nice Job
Nice use the the Librivox API. I was wondering if anyone had thought of creating a more limited sidebar widget for it, and here you have created a whole beautiful site interface.